


A Gentleman's Exile

by rosncrntz



Category: Henry IV - Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 2 - Shakespeare, SHAKESPEARE William - Works, The Hollow Crown (2012)
Genre: Established Relationship, Goodbyes, Homosexuality, M/M, Medieval Innuendos, Non-Explicit Sex, Not so subtle, Shakespearean Language, badly done, pure unadulterated angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-03
Updated: 2018-04-03
Packaged: 2019-04-18 03:09:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14203722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosncrntz/pseuds/rosncrntz
Summary: The King is dead. Long live King Henry V. But, before anyone finds out, Prince Hal sits in the corner of the tavern whilst his friend, his confidante, Ned Poins watches from a distance. He does not yet know that this is the last night he will see his sweet prince. Prince Hal is all too aware.





	A Gentleman's Exile

The Prince sat in brood over a half-full tankard in a shadowy corner known to Poins as the coldest corner of the tavern; the draft from the shutter blew in harshly on the squat bench and moulding table, and there was the distance of a few feet to the nearest candelabra, let alone the fire crackling across the room. His eyes had a hollow tired look to them and Poins noted that he had not spoken a word since he had arrived half an hour ago, except a grunt to command his drink be brought to him and the requisite murmur of thanks when it was given him. And Ned Poins, like a dejected cur, mused over the shadowy figure until the wooden beam he was resting his chin on began to ache his jaw and he was forced to stir and look restless.

This must have been cue enough for Mistress Quickly who pottered over to the lone gentleman and sighed, “We are all of us so dependent on the Prince’s good looks: when ‘e is merry, we amble and joke until the early morn, but when ‘e is forlorn,” Mistress Quickly took the tankard from Poins’ limp fist and rubbed it down with her apron, “we are dumb.”

Poins chuckled humourlessly and replied, “He looks fit to drown himself. Leave off his drinking for the night, will you?” Mistress Quickly hummed in thought. Prince Hal was a good customer. He always paid, unlike some others. To cut his stupor short would rob her of a few shillings. But the young Prince was not the only customer to always pay her: Poins would do so too, and so she looked at him gazing up at her, all honesty and concern and, like a mother, she could not refuse him.

“Very good.” She turned to walk away before swatting Poins’ thigh with her hand and warning, “But, if ‘e quarrel, you must explain to ‘im why the tap has dried up!”

“Excellent wench.”

Poins sank back to his position leaning on the beam and watched as Hal called for another drink, was refused, argued weakly for a moment, downed what little drops he could from the tankard he had, and slumped back into his chair so that now Poins could not make out a single feature of his face, save what his memory bestowed. Francis took Hal’s empty tankard from him and the Prince did not budge.

There must be some merriment! Poins thought. The hour was not yet two! Hal and Poins had rolled into their beds as the cock crew the morning light not long since: there was still time enough! Ned made his way towards the inky Prince, his footfall echoing in the tavern that was so quiet one would think it was deserted. Gone were the merry throes of drunkenness – but Poins would have them back.

Throwing himself down on the stool beside the Prince, Poins cried, “What is’t keeps thee from felicity, my dear lord?” Poins clapped a hand on the leather of Hal’s shoulder and shook him roughly and, when once Hal would buffet his grapples with lusty muscle, Poins winced to feel Hal’s pliant body shake in his grip. And, now that he could see the Prince’s face more clearly, he could spy the man’s hollow eye was harbouring saltwater. His throat seemed to shake for a moment in words unspoken. He cleared it.

Then he said very softly, “My father is dead.”

A foolish throat gave a laugh; half-disbelief and half-anguish but resulting in the thoughtless chuckle of an unfeeling friend. He checked himself with a harsh suck of air through his teeth and a straightening of his mouth into a hard and definite line, only twitching downwards at the corners.

“When?”

“Tonight, not two hours since.”

So soon? On this night: was’t possible? And so soon to slip into a sordid scene?

“Should not the bells have been sounded?”

“I expect they will be once the body is prepared.”

“You do not want to be there when they lay him to rest?”

“I could not bear it,” Hal choked, half-whispering in the chill.

Poins lent a hand across the table and commiserated, “Oh… sweet prince-”

“King.”

He had never before sounded like a King – not to Poins – until that very moment. He would remember it for the rest of his life: that awful seizing of his stomach, fear, upon hearing the voice of who was not long ago his best friend. Not a King. Never a King to him. What was a King? A boy in a crown – he could see that now. He could see that Hal was afraid and alone and grieving and playing pretend. And, though his voice declared God-given power, his eyes cried out.

“Hast thou eaten?” Poins asked, leaning close to spare the Prince – King – the embarrassment of being mothered by a crass nobleman. Hal shook his head meekly. “Mistress Quickly has a pottage on the fire.”

“No, Poins.”

“Tush tush, my lord, sit tight and stop your prattling.”

“You talk to a King so?” Hal jeered.

“Nay, sir, not a King. I say this to a man I have seen half-naked and half-mad drinking sack, like a bird i’ the nest, straight from the mouth of a cheap whore.”

Hal cracked his melancholy with a chuckle and, burying his head in his hands, he howled, “Oh, Ned, you will never allow me to forget that.” Poins laughed and, slapping the table, he leapt to his feet and made his way for the pot boiling over the fireplace. “I only did so once!” he heard Hal calling after him. He smiled, though Hal could not see the ease that became his features as he carefully took a wooden bowl and spooned a little stew into it for his friend. Hal could only see that leather-clad back of his, making the material flex with a muscular form beneath, and bleary-eyed he studied the gait of a man now so familiar to him but soon, he knew, would drift from the book of his memory as clouds do from the pane of a window to a man fixed on a throne. Oh, blissful ignorance, Hal thought, for Poins not yet to know that his Princely friend was condemned to be committee to his memory alone. Perhaps, Hal thought, if he looked long enough, and concentrated hard enough, that face would not wane with time spent apart and he might remember a man like Ned Poins in the agony of kingly office and it might bring him joy.

“Here,” Poins said, laying the bowl before Hal, “Do you wish me to feed it to you, too?” Hal laughed and thanked him and took the spoon. Broth dripped from his spoon as he lifted a lump of meat from the pool; he ate it with as few slurps as the wet food could allow. He dug his spoon into a mealy dumpling and ate that too. His stomach had not seemed so empty before for he was full of grief and sickness but, now he was eating, he appreciated the strength it lent his muscles. “Of course, you will soon be used to the higher things.”

“Boiled blood jelly and a peacock’s arse,” Hal laughed.

“You princely beggar, I would give my right arm for the rear-end of a peacock!” protested Poins in false-offence.

“A sotiltee of a pert pair of breasts!”

“No match for the real thing, eh?” Poins teased, clapping his hands over his breast to Hal’s great delight.

“Never, Ned! Oh, never!” Then, more soberly, Hal said, “I will miss this place.” His gaze flitted over wooden beams and onto candle-flickered walls: the large table that had carried his weight too oft, the corner that still bore the stains of Falstaff’s piss two months ago, the room upstairs that had housed his first lay with a whore. These memories were foul – but at least they smelled and felt pliant beneath fingertips and yielded rowdy noise. The pearls on a coronation robe could do no such things, nor the metal noose of a damned crown.

Poins – the Prince’s shadow always – fell into the same melancholy and gave only a bitter laugh when Hal mused, “Losing ourselves in drunkenness.” It had always been the same: Hal was, in himself, so past sense that he did not notice his companion remaining in sobriety. Ned Poins would always be ready at the end of the night to carry his friend up the stairs and to his lodgings, turning him on his side to keep him from choking on his own vomit, and waiting with him as he fell asleep.

Even singing to him, when he asked, though he never remembered it in the morning.

“I think I would find a sugar-paste bosom sickening,” Poins eventually jibed, breaking a tension that was beginning to suffocate.

“They are not for eating.”

“Pardon?”

“Sotiltees are decorative on the main.”

Poins scoffed, “Lord! You are a King indeed. A waste of good sugar.”

“Oh, I am not King,” Hal said with a weak smile, “An imposter out of his depth.”

“Fie!”

“Nay, ‘tis true.” Poins could not imagine a nobler soul for a King if Kings were things at all. Blonde hair curling like the mane of a lion and a profile fit for a coin: he was a King in a story read to children before sleep. A restless soul trapped in a perfect mould. “Shall I tell thee one thing, Poins?” Hal half-choked with a sudden rise in feeling that bid him speak what he loathed to impart. Ned must have sensed a tension in Hal’s voice, a shiver beneath the words perhaps, or a stubborn syllable at the last, and he turned to his friend with a furrowed brow.

“I have told thee before that I only care for excellent good things from thee.” He spoke this knowing that what Hal would speak would only harm, but in hope he held a vulnerable flank to a blade he might stab with.

“I cannot tell thee here. Come.”

Poins could do nothing else but follow as Hal rose, darted to the staircase, ascended, trod the creaking beams to his room: what would be his room until morn. Hal sat beside the window, and Poins stood beside the door, blotting out the sound of the clattering metal and idle chatter. Hal pondered in thought for a moment and Poins awaited something momentous to spring form that fine mouth of his when in fact all that emerged was, “Where is the bloat knight?”

“Gloucestershire, apparently, to inflate himself surely in the company of worse fools than he.”

“Are there such fools in Gloucestershire?” Hal laughed, but the laugh was cut short with a sigh. “Dost thou know when he will return?”

“Believe me, my lord, I do not keep track of him who I hate,” Poins hissed, pushing the door to the latch with his back and feeling his throat lurch in the heat of the room which, heady with drink and the closeness of their two persons, seemed to set Ned’s eyelids drooping. The only thing to keep him from sleeping was the incessant thundering of his heart – fearful, ever. “Why do you ask so relentlessly after the gluttonous knave? It does not suit thou well to be so thoughtful of one so undeserving, high born as thou now are.”

“Ned, seems thee to hate thy comrade more fiercely than ever now he is gone from thy company.”

“Believe me, lord, it is not through courtesy to him that I keep it so well hid.” So well hid: Hal could argue that, sure, he had seen Poins bite his tongue bloody on Falstaff’s teases. “But for concern of hurting you that I admit I-” Love was the word that rose to the front of Poins’ shut mouth and it was the word he swallowed back down without another noise. “Now, since he has disgraced himself in idle chat, rank to your noble person, there is no fear but freely I admit: I hate the man.” Hal could have admitted knowing, for years, of Ned Poins’ hatred for Sir John Falstaff, but any bitterness bred between him and his gentleman friend at this time would only rub salt into a wound he was forced to make.

“Well, friend, I am glad on’t – for my news will fall on ears glad to hear it.”

“Oh, sir, an excellent good thing!” An uneasy smile heralded his words. “Tell me it.”

“As King, all waste and luxury of youth must be brushed away: Falstaff, Mistress Quickly, Doll, Francis-”

Poins’ smile faded, and he gave a fruitless interruption of, “Even they?”

Hal heedlessly continued, “They will be banished after my coronation, by my decree,” Hal said, shaking his head, and biting on the side of his thumb. The moonlight petering through the diamond-grille windows had the strange effect of making him appear carved of alabaster and Ned thought that if he were to touch his skin it would be stone cold. For nothing so unfeeling could be warm.

“Banished?” Poins gasped. He had his back to the door and the weight of his tensed body was making the wood creak.

Hal nodded and spoke with a kingly dignity, “From my person, within the distance of ten mile.”

Ned turned his gaze away as his mouth fell slack. Hal was biting his finger until it hurt to keep the tears in his eyes from spilling. The silence was deafening. Oh, he still did not know, Hal’s mind screamed.

“Who is’t that knows?” Poins asked finally.

“Only you.”

“When will they know?”

“I will send guards to escort them away not long after my coronation,” he replied in heartless honesty.

Poins doubled over as if winded by an invisible brunt, and he staggered away from the door and sat on the bed making the wooden frame squeal as he cried, “Oh, God, my lord you should not have told me.”

“Why ever not?”

Poins turned his body violently towards his King and spat, “Because it lies not in me to keep such cruelty from our friends.” He was hunched like an animal in his fury but straightened up in shame, feeling the heat of his cheeks and the cold sweat on the back of his neck.

“Cruelty?”

“My lord, I say so,” Poins said with more dignity but no less feeling. Hal smiled, bright, but that smile did not seem so beautiful now, Poins thought. There was something challenging in that grin, straight and pearlescent. It seemed ready to string his coronation garments.

“I did not think I would find thou moved, Ned, on account of Falstaff. He who, only one moment since, you considered a hated fiend!”

Poins slapped his thigh in frustration and grunted, “You know I hate the fat paunch but,” Poins studied the agony in his own chest, “if I were King, lord, I would spare him his life.”

Hal fell speechless for a moment – an existence which did not suit him at all, and one which made him queasy with the awful freezing of the blood and the emptiness of the mouth and the feeling that one is on the edge of a yawn that never comes. Finally, with foolish speed, he cried, “But you are not King. You cannot know what a burden it is I carry.”

“No, I cannot, but-” Poins found himself void of breath and reason and dumb, too, like the King. Hal watched as Poins’ mouth opened and closed and listened to the shuffle of his breath stuttering at his lips and watched the dip of his sullen cheek tremble and how his eyes bore into the ground.

Hal found himself a softened Prince as he muttered, “Dost thou believe ‘twill hurt him so?”

“I’ faith, I know that it will,” Poins said, “He lives and breathes by your looks.”

Hal swallowed a lump and steeled himself to say, “It grieves me not-”

“These are hard words, my lord!” Poins interjected, but Hal would not be dissuaded as he rose himself in fever to cry, “It grieves me not so half so much as leaving thee does.”

Poins had risen from his seat and now, in a moment, his form seemed to crumple as if all the air that kept it alive had been let out of it, and the skin sagged, and the bone wilted and he let out a sigh which seemed to shatter his bulk and leave him empty and heaving. Hal watched this all happen in agonised silence, unable to say a thing more, nothing to help ease him.

“I?”

His voice warbled like that of a child. His eyes, too, were wide and searching: searching for a drop of mercy that he was all dry of, for he could reply with nothing but, “Yea, Ned.”

His body, seemingly exhausted, fell on to the roaring woodwork of the shallow bed and he sat a moment in silence. Hal had never heard a silence so deathly. Even Poins’ breath was now noiseless, so much so that Hal would have thought he had died if he could not see the leather being pulled across his broad back and his shoulders surging. When he finally brought himself to speak, his voice was a croak, “Why must I, a gentleman, and a keeper of your heart these six years since you were a brilliant youth of twenty-one, be brushed aside like the common rascal and drunken fool?”

“No, Ned, it is not that-”

“Francis! The buffoon who chucks tankards at you to fuel your stupor! He and I will walk hand-in-hand as brothers in banishment! When he has known a princely vagabond, and I have known all of you.”

“Ned.”

“Will you deny it now? King?” Poins cried, careless now of his shouts and the thin walls and floors and the congregation of vagrants assembled downstairs, “I am sure, King Henry, when you are asked of your formative years you will speak of peasants and rogues, and I alone will know the truth. I have kissed thy brow more times than I could hope to remember in years of penitent banishment – but now you will deny me? What else will you deny, my King, my lord? The heat of the bed we shared? Our faces close in the morning light through the window of a cheap tavern?” Across the hollow of Ned’s cheek passed a tear. “The touch-?” Poins could not bring himself to utter more for fear he should buckle over weeping or die of a broken heart. Only the wet of his cheeks gave him knowledge he was sobbing; he could not hear his own noise above the raging of his mind and his body was numb in its tremors.

“Ned.” Finally, Ned turned to Hal. “I deny none of it. I do not banish you.” Poins sighed: anger, frustration, confusion, mixing into a sour taste in his tongue, blood, body. “But from tomorrow morn we shall never meet.” Hal’s fist was clenched white to keep himself from unmanly weeping. It did not matter to him that Poins was already crying. “I hold property in the country-”

“You will bribe me from your side?”

“I offer you a home and living where you will be sheltered from remembrance of me and I of you.”

And what good would that do? Poins thought. He will never be forced to look upon his face more knowing that he cannot touch it, kiss it, laugh with it, but that same face will be branded into his memory no matter where he dwelt.

“This is an unfair bargain, my lord.”

“Why, Ned?”

“Let us say that you are to die first,” he said, before remembering a stale duty and muttering, “God save the King.” Hal turned his eyes down. “It does not matter where I live in England, or where I live in any civilised kingdom, I will hear of your death and your body will lie in a crypt a thousand miles from mine. And so, I will weep and curse and rage. But, if I am the first to die, you will ne’er hear of it, and so you will live and laugh and love others.”

“We do not keep friends to watch them die.”

“Then you cannot see now how this is killing me.”

Hal would cry out against God and throw his crown of thorns into the sea if he had the power to do it.

“What would you have me do?” Hal asked, “You talk as if I care not.”

Hal knew, very well, that this act would bring Ned Poins far more agony than it would ever bring him. Hal could bury himself in affairs of the state, work, war. Poins had little to do but pine. Hal knew it but could not admit it. Poins knew it too, of course. He knew how sick his heart could be.

But his sickened heart, once angry, began to dull as blazing silver does in time or water, and he drew himself up in dignity, wiping his eyes of their shameful tears, and spoke very calmly to the King, “You will leave in the morn?” Hal nodded. “Then I would have you lie with me until then. I would have you be soft and silent so as not to wake me when you leave. And I would have myself awake with only the smell of you but no material thing.”

“All this you would wish?” Hal asked. He had not expected something so silent. He had anticipated an agonised goodbye; a lingering gaze; a stubborn leg.

“I would wish no talk of this being the last.”

“Yes.”

Poins was rigid when he yielded to Hal’s first kiss. Hal was a little too feverish, a little too enthusiastic. He had tipped himself from his seat and had come cascading like a wild thing to where Poins sat on the bed and with clumsy hands – as if unschooled in this which was not new to him – he had pushed him back with a moan on to his mouth. He made his body something malleable and allowed Hal to move him and kiss him and run hands across his chest and he only half-listened to the words Hal said as his gaze travelled over the man’s shoulder and out into the harsh white light of the moon.

“Ned. My Ned.” That was what Poins could hear. He could have returned the favour with groaned affectations of his own, but his throat stubbornly closed over and all he could offer Hal, who was trying so hard, was breath. The tolling of the bell for the King’s death rang out when Poins arched for Hal. He noticed him stutter. Great hollow noise.

He was a King now. And Ned shivered in the King’s grace.

Hal was first to fall asleep, in the bed beside Poins, and Poins lay for what seemed like hours upon hours watching as his vision of the moon disappeared and slowly the dark sky lightened and lightened in the mein of the cruel sun. And still Poins stayed awake, and still Hal slept. The birds began to sing and the soft murmur of morning movement from the street below and the songs of Mistress Quickly beginning her work filtered into the room. What would she do, Poins wondered, when her world was seized from her by the cruelty of a King? Ten miles. What a distance that was for a woman with nothing. The noise thickened and darkened and still Hal slept. And still he slept. And he continued sleeping and Poins continued waking until a crash of metal – tankards from Francis’ clumsy arms – startled the sleeping King and made him rear his drowsy head. Poins shut his eyes in a moment. If he breathed slowly enough. If he lay still enough.

Ned Poins listened to the creaking wood as Hal prised himself carefully from the sheets. He listened as Hal arranged the clothes he wore, that dry scratch of material against skin. He listened to Hal sigh, and linger; he listened to the footfall pace and the door open and close and open again and close again and all the while Poins lay still and silent whilst his mind begged for him to leave.

Then a voice: “Poins?”

Poins remained still as stone.

“Ned? Edward?”

His gaze remained dark.

“Sweet?”

He made no noise.

Poins listened to the click of the latch. He listened to the hinges of the wooden door screech and crack and then the hollow burst of the slamming door. He listened to footfall down the stairs but still he dared not open his eyes. He listened to the tavern door open, close again, and then he heard footsteps in the street and more footsteps and more and more until no one tread could be discerned from another and the patter of the street became one and Hal could no longer be heard.

But that smell. He breathed in deep through his nose. Yes.

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, God, this hurt to write. I apologise for the mock-Shakespearean dialogue; I'm no Shakespeare. But I do hope you enjoyed and please pop me a comment/review to let me know what you thought!


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